Sing, Unburied, Sing Quotes

“Sorrow is food swallowed too quickly, caught in the throat, making it nearly impossible to breathe.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Some days later, I understood what he was trying to say, that getting grown means learning how to work that current: learning when to hold fast, when to drop anchor, when to let it sweep you up.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I hope I fed you enough. While I'm here. So you carry it with you. Like a camel.' I can hear the smile in her voice, faint. A baring of teeth. 'Maybe that ain't a good way of putting it. Like a well, Jojo. Pull that water up when you need it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants [...] since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that too. Can eat a person until there’s nothing but bone and skin and a thin layer of blood left. How it can eat your insides and swell you in wrong ways.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“It stays with me, a bruise in the memory that hurts when I touch it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I washed my hands every day, Jojo. But that damn blood ain't never come out. Hold my hands up to my face, I can smell it under my skin. Smelled it when the warden and sergeant cam up on us, the dogs yipping and licking blood from they muzzles. They'd torn his throat out, hamstringed him. Smelled it when the warden told me I'd done good. Smelled it the day they let me out on account I'd led the dog that caught and killed Richie. Smelled it when I finally found his mama after weeks of searching, just so I could tell her Richie was dead and she could look at me with a stone face and shut the door on me. Smelled it when I made it home in the middle of the night, smelled it over the sour smell of the bayou and the salt smell of the sea, smelled it years later when I climbed into bed with Philomene, put my nose in your grandmother's neck, and breathed her in like the scent of her could wash the other away. But it didn't. When Given died, I thought I'd drown in it. Drove me blind, made me so crazy I couldn't speak. Didn't nothing come close to easing it until you came along.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time. Where”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Can't nothing bother me when I got my hands in the dirt, he said. Like I'm talking to God with my fingers.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Ain't no good in using anger just to lash. You pray for it to blow up a storm that's going to flush out the truth.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“There's too much blank sky where a tree once stood.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y'all one and it beats like your heart.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“It’s like a snake that sheds its skin. The outside look different when the scales change, but the inside always the same.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“There's so many,' Richie says. His voice is molasses slow. 'So many of us,' he says. 'Hitting. The wrong keys. Wandering against. The song.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I don’t want to be empty breath. Bitter at the marrow of my bones. I don’t want that, Leonie.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Sometimes the world don’t give you what you need, no matter how hard you look. Sometimes it withholds.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“After, Mam,' I say. 'What happens when you pass away?"
I couldn't bear her being a ghost. Couldn't take her sitting in the kitchen, invisible. Couldn't take seeing Pop walk around her without touching her cheek, without bending to kiss her on her neck.
'It's like walking through a door, Jojo.'
'But you won't be no ghost, huh, Mam?' I have to ask even though I know the telling hurts her. Even though I feel like speaking's bringing her leaving closer. Death, a great mouth set to swallow.
'Can't say for sure. But I don't think so. I think that only happens when the dying's bad. Violent. The old folks always told me that when someone dies in a bad way, sometimes it's so awful even God can't bear to watch, and then half your spirit stays behind and wanders, wanting peace the way a thirsty man seeks water.' She frowns: two fishhooks dimpling down. 'That ain't my way.'
'That don't mean I won't be here, Jojo. I'll be on the other side of the door. With everybody else that's gone before. Your uncle Given, my mama and daddy, Pop's mama and daddy.'
'How?'
'Because we don't walk no straight lines. It's all happening at once. All of it. We all here at once. My mama and daddy and they mamas and daddies.' Mam looks to the wall, closes her eyes. 'My son.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“The memory is a living thing – it too is in transit. But during its moment, all that is remembered joins, and lives – the old and the young, the past and the present, the living and the dead. –from One Writer’s Beginnings, by Eudora Welty”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“But another part of me wants to shake Jojo and Michaela awake, to lean down and yell so they startle and sit up so I don't have to see the way they turn to each other like plants following the sun across the sky. They are each other's light.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“The sky has turned the color of sandy red clay: orange cream. The heat of the day at its heaviest: the insects awoken from their winter slumber. I cannot bear the world.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Home ain't always about a place. The house I grew up in is gone, ain't nothin' but a field and some woods but even if the house was still there - it ain't about that. I don't know. Home is about the earth. Whether the earth open up to you. Whether it pull you so close the space between you and it melt and y’all one and it beats like your heart. Same time.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I stand until there is no sun. I stand until I smell pine through the salt and sulfur. I stand until the moon rises and their mouths close and they are a murder of silver crows. I stand until the forest is a black-knuckled multitude.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Lot of folks was in there for stealing food because everybody was poor and starving, and even though White people couldn’t get your work for free, they did everything they could to avoid hiring you and paying you for it.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“You my baby.” She breathes heavy, and the grate cracks and sinks to rusted stillness. “Like I drew the veil back so you could walk in this life, you’ll help me draw it back so I can walk in the next.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Before all the little mean things she told me gathered and gathered and lodged like grit in a skinned knee.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Growing up out here in the country taught me things. Taught me that after the first fat flush of life, time eats away at things: it rusts machinery, it matures animals to become hairless and featherless, and it withers plants. Once a year or so, I see it in Pop, how he got leaner and leaner with age, the tendons in him standing out, harder and more rigid, every year. His Indian cheekbones severe. But since Mama got sick, I learned pain can do that, too.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“Because I wanted Michael's mouth on me, because from the first moment I saw him walking across the grass to where I sat in the shadow of the school sign, he saw me. Saw past skin the color of unmilked coffee, eyes black, lips the color of plums, and saw me. Saw the walking wound I was, and came to be my balm.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I'm tired of this shit,' I say. I don't know why I say it. Maybe because I'm tried of driving, tired of the road stretching before me endlessly, Michael always at the opposite end of it, no matter how far I go, how far I drive. Maybe because part of me wanted her to leap for me, to smear orange vomit over the front of my shirt as her little tan body sought mine, always sought mine, our hearts separated by the thin cages of our ribs, exhaling and inhaling, our blood in sync. Maybe because I want her to burrow in to me for succor instead of her brother. Maybe because Jojo doesn't even look at me, all his attention on the body in his arms, the little person he's trying to soothe, and my attention is everywhere. Even now, my devotion: inconstant.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“She bought me betta fish when I was six, after I kept telling her the same story, every day, about the tanks we had in my class at school, the betta fish, red and purple and blue and green, swimming lazily in the tanks, flashing brilliant and then dull. She came home with one on a Sunday, after she'd been out all weekend. I hadn't seen her since Friday, since she told Mam she was going to the store to buy some milk and some sugar and didn't come back. When she came back, her skin was dry and flaking at the corners of her mouth, her hair stuck out in a bushy halo, and she smelled like wet hay. The fish was green, the color of pine needles, and he had stripes down his tail the color of red mud. I called him Bubby Bubbles, since he blew bubbles all day, and when I leaned over his tank, I could hear him crunching on the fish food Leonie had brought home in a sample-size bag. I imagined even then that one day I could lean over his bowl, and instead of crunching, little words would pop out the bubbles that fizzed up to the surface. Big face. Light. And love. But when the sample size of fish food ran out, and I asked Leonie to buy me more, she said she would, and then forgot, again and again, until old day she said: Give him sold old bread. I figured he couldn't crunch like needed on some old bread, so I kept bugging her about it, and Bubby got skinnier and skinnier, his bubbles smaller and smaller, until I walked into the kitchen one day and he was floating on top of the water, his eyes white, a slimy scrim like fat, no voice in his bubbles.

Leonie kill things.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing

“I swallow. I breathe. All delicious and damned.”
― Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing